Business infrastructures are designed to support business enterprises and the solutions they provide. A business infrastructure includes technological as well as non-technological components. Technological components include hardware and software components that implement an underlying information technology (IT) infrastructure for one or more business processes. Non-technological components include the organizational structure and operation of the business enterprise and manual business processes. The architectures of business infrastructures are generally required to handle varying degrees of workload and priorities under imposed business constraints.
The design of business infrastructures having such requirements and constraints represents a real challenge. Most existing methodologies, tools and techniques concentrate on static, partial descriptions of business infrastructures. Dynamic system behavior is generally unknown until the system is in construction or in operation, thus, limiting the possibilities for improvement. Unacceptable performance issues may become exacerbated as the system evolves with the addition of new business solutions that must be supported by the architecture.
Furthermore, when the origin of a problem resides in questionable decisions made early in the development process, the cost of improvement could become prohibitive when a redesign of the business infrastructure is required at some level. A tremendous amount of investment may be lost due to the design of unacceptable infrastructures.